In Defense of Myself

So now Jake over at Page One Kentucky has gone and said a vaguely nice thing about me over at his blog, and I can't figure out what to do. This has never happened before. I am trying to figure out what I have done to warrant this and how I should deal with the potential consequences of the idea getting around that I might actually not be the Devil himself.

This could very well ruin my reputation.

The occasion for Jake's comments is apparent criticism he is getting from the Gay Tolerance Police over the fact that he links to my blog.

All you gays constantly complaining that we dare link to Martin Cothran have got to be the biggest bunch of hypocrites we’ve encountered.

Who cares that we link to him? And who cares that we think his outlook on life is rather bogus? What the hell is so wrong with keeping up with the world and having a continued conversation – even with your critics and opponents?

And then this:

So we hope it blows their minds to have to admit he’s more cordial than half the people at KDP and more professional than a solid majority of the state legislature. Maybe they’ll throw up a little in their mouths and complain about something else for a few minutes.

I have made no secret of the fact that, despite his repeated fashion assaults on the quality of my wardrobe, I find Jake terribly amusing and Page One the most informative blog on state politics. And then he goes and does this.

No more Mr. Nice Guy.

The Psychology of Apocalypse: How poetry saved the world

Last weekend's abortive Judgment Day just goes to show what happens when you ignore the poets.

I didn't know anything about Harold Camping's theology, but I didn't need to know much to conclude that he was a dispensationalist. The theology of the man who garnered worldwide media attention for what turned out to be a failed prediction about the end of the world comes from a movement that began in the 19th century and has produced what we might charitably call the "Rapture industry."

Dispensationalism is a modernist school of theology within Protestantism that holds that God has ordained different and successive "ages" in the life of the church in each of which God relates to the church in some different way. God uses these dispensations to progressively unfold His revelation to the church. The exact number of these ages or dispensations depends on which dispensationalist you talk to, but they generally number from three to seven. What they agree upon, however, is that we are in the second-to-the-last age--the age that precedes the "Rapture."

The "Rapture" is the label affixed to the event whereby Jesus returns (sort of) and takes the church out of the world before the seven year tribulation because, you know, God would not allow Christians to be persecuted (despite the fact that He has allowed it repeatedly throughout history). It's the First Second Coming as opposed to the Second Second Coming, when He comes for real and kicks butt and takes names. This school of thought was initially popularized by the Schofield Reference Bible.

The dispensationalist view of the end times (what is called "premillenial pretribulationism," meaning that Jesus will return before a thousand year earthly reign after he has first sort of returned to take the church out of the world to spare it from a seven year tribulation period) overflowed its dispensationalist banks first in a book published in the 1970s called The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey. The book was not only a bestseller; it was the biggest selling book of the decade (even though the New York Times somehow managed to prevent it from ever appearing on a bestseller list because it was a religious book), making Lindsey a multi-millionaire.

The view later spilled out into into non-evangelical world with onset of the Left Behind books, authored by Tim LaHaye and ghostwritten by Jerry Jenkins--books which also sold in the millions and were actually allowed to appear on the bestseller lists by the secular literary authorities.

The penchant for setting dates for the end of the world is a peculiarly dispensationalist habit. If you go back, you can find Lindsey doing it, although he did a better job of rhetorically hedging his bets than the more reckless Camping. For Lindsey, the date was 1988, which passed with a similar lack of apocalyptic action and a much smoother exit strategy by the author.

I call dispensationalism "modernist" because, like modernism in general, it is marked by the tendency to quantify the unquantifiable. This is the largest part of its appeal: it gives you definite answers, neat timelines, and simple, literal explanations. In fact, you've got to hand it to them: the dispensationalists produce the best charts. They have charts for the ages of the church, charts for the Rapture, charts for the millenium, charts for the tribulation.

In the early 1980s, the wags at a Christian satire magazine Wittenburg Door published a detailed End Times chart that showed the rapture of the newly rich Hal Lindsey's Porsche. Had it not been published so relatively early in his life, it might also have included the eschatological trajectory of all four of his successive wives.

The failure of dispensationalist End Times claims are due largely to a simple lack of poetic sense among its adherents. Apocalyptic literature is a literary mixture of the real and the visionary, the mundane and the fantasic, and the literal and the metaphorical that has a sort of surreal quality. It presents persons, places, and events that may have both a figurative and a concrete application, and that can have multiple referents. Time plays tricks and even numbers cannot be quantified.

What does the Beast represent? What is the meaning of his seven heads and ten horns? Who is the Anti-Christ? Who or what is Babylon? Under the gaze of a non-literary mind, each of these must have a definite one-on-one allegorical referent. The figurative must be pursued and rendered literal, and no metaphor can escape without being captured, tagged, and totaled.

There is little tolerance for poetic latitude, and there is no patience for the inexact.

To listen to people like Pat Robertson (another famous dispensationalist) try to explain the meaning of the Book of Revelation is a painful exercise because he is dealing with a form of expression that he simply does not understand. Poetry is a language with its own rules and its own methods of interpretation. It is a language with which these people are simply unfamiliar.

This is why Bob Dylan is a better theologian than Tim LaHaye. He at least understands the poetic. In fact, I've got a test that all interpreters of Revelation should have to pass before they are allowed to make public statements on the Book of Revelation. Here's how it works:

Test #1: The aspiring eschatologist should first be asked to interpret and explain Dante's Divine Comedy. If he cannot, then his prophet's license should be temporarily suspended.

Test #2: Next, he should be asked to explain the following poems: "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats; "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," by William Blake; and "The Hollow Men," by T. S. Eliot. If the candidate cannot perform this procedure either, he should be required to refrain from making public statements on the End Times altogether.

Test #3: If the aspiring prophet has failed the first two tests, he should be asked to make sense of the lyrics to the following songs: "The Earth Died Screaming," by Tom Waits; "When the Ship Comes In," by Bob Dylan; and "When the Man Comes Around," by Johnny Cash. If he stumbles here too, he should simply be put out of the city with a week's worth of provisions and told not to come back.

He's hopeless.

Willliams/Farmer first ad in gubernatorial campaign

David Williams blasts the Jefferson County education establishment

There is still smoke wafting from the barrel of David Williams editorial gun. Just a day after winning the Republican nomination for governor, the candidate opened fire in the Louisville Courier-Journal on the Jefferson County school establishment for its sorry education record. He blasted the editorial board, the teachers union and Gov. Beshear for sacrificing children to their social and political agenda of busing and quotas:

Only Beshear's editorial board masters could judge the last 35 years in the Jefferson County school system successful. The absurdity of the student assignment plan is illustrated by the WAVE-3 television report of a 6-year-old girl forced to spend over two hours on a school bus when there are two schools within a mile of her house. If that is your definition of “35 years of accomplishment” then you need to recalibrate your world view. Supporting two-hour bus rides for 6-year-old kids but failing to see that no child is getting a better education because of it is about as out-of-touch as it gets. Jefferson County has 60 percent of the worst performing schools in the state but only 18 percent of the students. Our kids deserve better.

Williams came in third in the Republican primary vote in Jefferson County, but that was largely because of low voter turnout and the fact that he was facing two Jefferson County natives. But he knows he needs something to fire up his supporters in Louisville and distinguish him from Beshear. This ought to do it. It will also make for an exciting campaign.

The Jefferson County education establishment worships the gods of Diversity and Political Correctness like the Canaanites worshiped Moloch. Child sacrifice is nothing new.

Hawking thinks he is a computer, is unafraid to be turned off

Maybe it is easier for someone like physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gerhig's Disease and is almost completely dependent on technology for everything--including his ability to speak, to think that he actually is a computer. Hawking has recently announced that he thinks he is little more than a computer and, seemingly because of this, is unafraid to die:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Those of us who are still under the impression that we are humans can be excused for being a little skeptical of the assertion from someone who thinks his brain is actually a pre-programmed machine that he doesn't believe in a programmer. This is the second time in recent months that Hawking has stepped outside his field of expertise (physics) to make proclamations about issues on which he is a mere amateur (religious and philosophy). And his second attempt at it is little better than the first.

For the creature who created the computer to announce that he actually is the very thing he created seems on the face of it to lack basic plausibility. What if a famous painter suddenly announced that men were merely portraits? How would we react if a prominent sculptor all of a sudden issued a statement saying he thought men were really just statues? And I wonder what we would say if an accountant decided that we were all just entries on a spreadsheet.

In fact, if you look at the kinds of things most people do, they very seldom seem to come to these kinds of conclusions. A farmer seldom decides, based on raising animals his whole life, that men are basically cows or sheep. And funeral directors rarely come to the decision that all people are really just nicely dressed corpses.

Why is it that some scientists, then, are so prone to making these broad reductionist claims? How can the practitioners of such a great discipline go so terribly wrong about the world outside their own field of study? It sometimes seems as if the clarity of the their thought on things outside science varied in inverse proportion to their knowledge of the things that are the subject of science.

Disco Diagnosis: Is Arnold Scharzennegger really suffering from "Love Addiction"?

I would say that now I have heard everything, but, as soon as I say it, I will hear something else from the Men In White Coats that I have not heard before and that I wouldn't have thought that supposedly intelligent people would even have thought of and I will realize once again that I have really not heard everything. They are imaginative people, these people who think everything is analyzable by science.

Today's episode of Let's Apply Science To Something It Has Little To Do With involves Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who, it turns out, fathered a child by a member of his house staff, which has caused the news programs to look for explanations in all the wrong places.

[And I should probably specify here that the person who bore the child was female for the Women's and Gender Studies folks out there who have convinced themselves that men and women aren't really different after all.]

Whenever a public official is found to have committed a moral indiscretion, the news programs call, not on anyone who is an expert in morality, but on someone who is an expert on disease. Instead of a priest, or perhaps an ethicist (a class of people in whose existence I frankly do not believe) they call on a psychologist.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, following the current custom, called in a "Dr. Drew" (didn't catch his full name), whom he pressed for an explanation. Dr. Drew, who has never actually had Schwarzenegger as a patient, much less ever even talked to the man, was in no doubt as to the diagnosis: it was a "classic case," he said, of "Love Addiction."

Now I don't know how they select the names for diseases in psychology, but I'm thinking that there should probably be some requirement that the name of a psychological malady not sound like it might have been the title of a hit song for K. C. and the Sunshine Band.

We first witnessed the descent of psychology into disco diagnosis last year, when the TV shrinks identified Tiger Woods' problem as "Sex Addiction," a diagnosis which Woods gladly accepted (better to have a disease than commit a moral failure) and for which he announced he would seek "treatment."

But it is not only the increasing triviality of the pop psychological diagnosis of wayward celebrities that is remarkable, but the underlying speciousness of the whole enterprise. I have remarked elsewhere regarding the tendency in our culture to try to explain away human moral behavior through scientific hocus-pocus. Aristotle divided the reasons for human behavior (of which he identified seven) into the voluntary and the involuntary. Our entire culture is trying to shift behavior from the voluntary, where we are responsible moral agents, to the involuntary, where we are merely amoral spectators of our own behavior.

You are not responsible for contracting a "disease."

But the Dr. Drews of the world take this process to an even more absurd level. With Anderson Cooper facilitating, the expert somehow managed at one and the same time to excuse Schwarzenegger for his behavior by diagnosing him with a disease ("Love Addiction"), but kept reminding his audience that this didn't make what he did "okay."

Well, if it was a disease, then why wasn't it "okay"? And what exactly does "okay" mean? Why didn't he say, not that it still wasn't "okay," but that it was still "wrong"? Is there something wrong with the word "wrong"?

I have a solution for all the psychological nonsense we get treated to whenever a public official or a celebrity falls from grace.

CNN needs to hire some old, crotchety, no-nonsense priest to come on whenever this happens. Anderson would say, "Father O'Malley, what went wrong here? How could [insert name of latest wayward celebrity] this have happened?"

Then the priest would look at Cooper, shake his head, and say (and I'm thinking an Irish accent would be helpful here), "Anderson, are ye daft? Or mebbe you've been hittin' the bottle again? Why the man's a sinner: that's what's wrong with 'im." Then the priest, who would have an intimate understanding of sin from having heard confessions and prescribed penance for his entire adult life, could explain the finer points of temptation and moral failure, which involve among other things, Getting Down Tonight, which results from a little to much Shaking of the Booty, because That's the Way you Liked It at the time--only later to realize that even your Boogie Shoes are not going help you run away from it.

And then he could assure Anderson that Schwarzenegger's being a sinner doesn't mean what he did was not wrong. And this remark, unlike Dr. Drew's, would have the advantage of not being rationally inconsistent with everything he had just said.

Attorney General Conway continues to hammer gas companies, ignore tuition increases

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway is again bearing down on gas companies for raising their prices. Today he filed a temporary injunction against Marathon Petroleum Co.

So far, no word from the AG about anything he plans to do on price-gouging by state universities, who have once again raised tuition in excess of inflation.

C'mon Jack. We're waiting ...

Presbyterians wave the white flag on moral principles

The Presbyterian Church, USA has approved the ordination of gays to their clergy. You gotta hand it to them: they sure put a lot of effort into trying to keep their own religious moral rules indexed to those of secular culture. And then there's that problem of explaining to their congregations why they keep doing things that are in direct conflict with the Bible they claim to adhere to.

I don't envy them.

Surely this couldn't have anything to do with the membership decline we hear about every year.

Anthony Esolen defends English against bad Bible translations

Every issue of First Things magazine I receive confirms once again that it is simply the best journal of its kind anywhere. In the new June/July issue, the inimitable Anthony Esolen takes on the issue of bad Bible translations in his article "A Bumping Boxcar Language." He addresses the New American Bible (NAB), which has plagued Catholics in a similar way the New International Version (NIV) has Protestants:

The bland, Scripture-muffling, colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase American Catholics have had for forty years often was not a translation at all, nor even a paraphrase into English. It was a paraphrase into Nabbish, the secrete official language of the New American Bible.

The principles of "Nabbish," says Esolen, are 1) Prefer the "general to the specific, the abstract to the concrete, the vague to the abstract"; 2) Prefer "the neuter, the indefinite, and the impersonal"; and 3) Prefer "the office memoradum to the poem." His examples suit his argument perfectly. All you have to do is sit through a reading of the 23rd Psalm in a mass to see how these translations have sucked the life out of the language.

Esolen doesn't attempt to isolate what is causing this, but I stand by my hypothesis that because Bible translators are culled almost exclusively from the ranks of "Bible experts" and not people with any exceptional facility with English, as I have observed elsewhere. (Also here)

Wall Street journal: Student debt at record high

According to the Wall Street Journal, student debt continues to rise to mammoth proportions.

Unfortunately, the writer of the story has a rather strange view of why this might be good: because it will cause them to try to make more money. Hmmm. Wouldn't that be the case also if each of them simply had that amount of money stolen from them?

Sheeez.

Sex ed course cancelled, human race saved

There may now be some hope that the human race can avert annihilation: one university, anyway, has decided to can its human sexuality course. As I have said before, if modern educators do to sex what they have done to reading, writing, and arithmetic, they could very well bring about the extinction of the race. Fortunately, however,--at least at one university, cooler heads have prevailed.

"Northwestern University’s Department of Psychology will not offer a course in human sexuality during the 2011-12 academic year,” the university said in an official statement.

So says Inside Higher Education.

The course was, apparently, the most popular course at Northwestern. I am shocked. So shocked. More hormone charged college students wanting to take a course on sex as opposed to, say, calculus?

Robert VerBruggen at National Review says that, despite the sometimes "circus-like atmosphere," this was an overreaction, and that school officials should simply come up with new guidelines. I don't know. The current wisdom at our universities is that, among other things, males and females are not fundamentally different at all. If you can't even get that right, you why anyone would think such a course would be anything but preposterous.

The higher ed bubble. When will it burst?

They're continuing to increase the size of the college education bubble, says economist Mark Perry at Carpe Diem. Don't want to be around when it bursts.